Paths To The Stars
by Black Jester
Summary: One-shot. "In her memory, he will always be feathers falling on a rainy day, will always be smiles wrapped in white cloth and otherworldly eyes, and he dances even now on the precipice between remembrance and oblivion." BeatrixKuja-leanings.


I've been bitten by the bug of Kuja/Beatrix fics, and I just can't help myself. I suppose that there's a need for them, since we shippers of madmen and one-eyed generals are such a minority. And besides, I enjoy writing them, since then I can fit my favourite things into one fic; Kuja, Beatrix, and twisted madness. Neat.

Disclaimer; I own none of the characters or places depicted herein, as they all belong to Square-Enix, and I am earning no money on it.

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The world is born in a flurry of fire and falling stars, forged by the desperately shining wish not to die, so strong that it burns its marks into some other creation.

She is not there to see it, of course; all she sees is a swirling, burning sphere of purples and whites and pulsing darkness, and somehow she knows it is him, even without asking. In her memory, he will always be feathers falling on a rainy day, will always be smiles wrapped in white cloth and otherworldly eyes, and he dances even now on the precipice between remembrance and oblivion.

The world dies in an explosion of lights, not fading but burning up like the last flame of a fire licking across the desert, so white that it prints his image on the inside of her eyelid.

Tears might be running down her cheeks from the pain and she knows then that she may never be able to see again, but when everyone else shields their eyes and curse, she smiles.

Nothing lasts forever, and her footsteps are swallowed by the wind when she returns, two years after the memories died, and this time she is not smiling. There is nothing left to smile about.

The trunk of the tree is larger than she remembers it, towering like a forgotten titan above her where it reaches for the sky while clinging to the earth, and she nearly falls back down on the dry, cracked sand as she tries to see the top of it. It lies beyond her scope of vision, a green and brown prison so high above the plains that it may as well be floating on the clouds.

The roots are slippery beneath her booted feet, treacherous and laughing if a tree can laugh, but she grits her teeth and keeps climbing. She is nothing if not determined. Air thins out the closer to the sun it gets, and soon she is panting for breath for all that she is in a good condition, gasping and head throbbing before she reaches her destination.

It is not the crown of the tree that holds her curiosity; it is nothing but a maze of leaves and twisting branches, wrapping around each other in a cage with no prisoner. It is the gaping maw in the middle of the trunk, left there a thousand years before her birth when there had been no one to see what made it, that makes her put one foot in front of the other, dragging herself up on sheer iron-will.

Halfway, she unbuckles her belt and does not look back as her sword goes tumbling down towards the cracked ground a hundred feet below. It is dead weight now.

Even as she stands upright for the first time in an eternity of climbing, feet unsteady on the pulsing floor of the trunk, the dark chasm dwarfs her until she feels insignificant. With the last rays of the sun burning into the back of her neck, she closes her eye one last time before she walks wide-eyed into the darkness.

The long way down is a spiral of spindly, skeletal roots, bleached white from never seeing the sun, and she walks along them as if descending into hell. She has gone beyond the map, and here, there be dragons, hiding in the shadows and they are the same sickly reddish pink colour of a closing wound, dead eyes watching her.

The darkness thickens as she descends, closing in and choking, but she walks on with her head held high. This is not a sinner's crawl to forgiveness, nor is she running away; this, she reasons, is _necessity. _The deeper she goes, the warmer the air becomes, but even as it heats up until it becomes unbearable, she does not complain or stop and turn.

Darkness gives way to a reddish, pulsing light that seems almost alive, buried so far beneath the surface that she cannot imagine it know of the open blue skies. The roots beneath her turn from pale white to a healthy colour she has not expected to find down here, and her boots nearly slip on their way down the natural stairs.

She has not come for redemption or salvation. She has come for a confirmation she is not certain can be found, and it has taken her to the very roots of the world, where there sleeps a more complex evil than any that her world has seen. Beneath her but not far now laps the waves of life like a green mist, and it lights her up with an eerie glow.

Here, so far beneath the world that it may as well not exist, there is a prison, a closed cage of darkness in between the sea of life and the titan-tree, and she breaks it open with her hands, watches as the wood crumbles away as if it was never there, leaving only a jagged tear that stings more in her mind than it does in the fibres of the tree.

She steps inside, hesitant for the first time since her arrival, and breathes in the warmth and the damp and the smell of sweet rot. Death lingers in here like an old lover, its slow caress bringing chills down her spine, and here, in the depths of earth and life and roots, she does not know what to do.

Something moves in the darkness, a flash of white more grey than anything else now, sharp against the greenish black, and she lets out the breath she does not know she has been holding.

This is how the world ends, small and quiet and dark, no longer burning but still just as intense as the day when she was an actress in a play she did not know the lines to.

She smiles when no one can see her, and lets the world go.


End file.
